Top Story

As a foundational technology, text analytics has a lot of versatility, but its broad potential use can make it difficult to explain to prospective users. Whatever a company's pain point, chances are that text analytics can be part of the solution, and there is plenty of room for growth, both across different industry verticals and horizontally within an organization.

Connect the dots

Version 4.0 of Inxight Software's SmartDiscovery includes significant enhancements to its existing search, entity extraction, categorization and taxonomy capabilities, as well a fact extraction capability said to "connect the dots" between the people, places and organizations referenced in text, allowing users to quickly discover non-obvious events and relationships.

SmartDiscovery 4.0 extends its entity extraction capability to determine specific events and relationships, or "facts," between entities, says the company, adding that this capability allows users to quickly create meaningful structure from large volumes of unstructured data. Inxight reports fact extraction enables users to quickly define and extract the events and relationships that are most important to them. Users can now identify and leverage otherwise hidden data to make faster, better informed decisions, claims Inxight.

In a competitive intelligence application, for example, SmartDiscovery can read and interpret documents from any source to identify M&A activities across industry sectors. The information, which might include the companies involved, transaction dates and associated costs, is stored as database records that can be easily accessed by users and applications.

SmartDiscovery 4.0 provides significant entity extraction speed improvements, as well as a new relevancy ranking option that determines an entity's importance to a document as a whole, enabling users to more quickly and easily decide whether or not a particular document is relevant to their needs. Further, says the company, SmartDiscovery combines standard keyword search capabilities with concept search, similarity search and a powerful query language available. As a result, one-word searches lead users immediately to the information that they need.

SmartDiscovery 4.0 users can also now search based on part-of-speech. For example, a user can search for the word "award" and ask for only documents that contain the past tense of the verb, "awarded," and not noun versions such as "Academy Award." SmartDiscovery 4.0 also includes new spell checking and fuzzy search capabilities that enable users to locate relevant information even if keywords are misspelled. In addition, fielded search and multiple ranking options have been added, and enhancements have been made to increase scalability and ease administration.

Inxight's new offering also provides improvements to its taxonomy management and categorization capabilities. Its taxonomy editor leverages the Inxight query language, providing more flexibility for users seeking to classify documents into well-organized taxonomies. Ease-of-use enhancements include an improved interface for taxonomy development and management and new document clustering methods for taxonomy creation